


Hope is The Thing

by Schwoozie



Category: Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Bethyl Week, Children, F/M, Funeral Home, Hope, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-21
Updated: 2014-07-21
Packaged: 2018-02-09 18:54:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1994058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Schwoozie/pseuds/Schwoozie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Daryl, Beth, and insomnia under the stars.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hope is The Thing

**Author's Note:**

> I cannot believe I got through Bethyl Week alive. Thank you to milkshakemicrowave for your beta'ing, and to khaleesibetch as well for your endless support. <3s to all.
> 
> One small instance of bad language, as well as brief ambiguous underage sexual activity (I imagine it to be underage, but you don't have to see it that way).
> 
> Written for the prompt "hope"

It's a few minutes past midnight when Daryl wanders onto the porch, drawn by the gleam of moonlight on her outstretched arms.

Midnight used to be small potatoes to a degenerate like him, but it's considered late, these days. Beth must be used to it—Beth, the good farmer's girl, who he bets never went to bed after 11, never wandered the streets till dawn, living off a pilfered six-pack and the tail-end of a cocaine huff. Never had to hitch it back with a man requiring service for the pleasure. Has never known the dead of night—only the birth of morning.

Daryl is used to his midnights—but in this new world where kerosene is scarce and darkness aplenty, it's not often they stay awake far beyond dusk. It's strange to think that this is how their ancestors lived for thousands of years—living and dying by the whims of the moon and sun, the rise and fall of seasons. For a man like Daryl, who has always lived close to the earth, there's a kind of peace in it—that there's nothing strange in nights spent sitting with her, close in the candlelight.

Her eyes fly open when she hears his step, and his heart flutters at the speed with which she relaxes, welcomes his presence. She's spread a blanket out across the deck—well back from their makeshift alarm system, he notes with satisfaction. She's done up in a set of clothing they found in the upstairs, sweatpants and a men's sweater that goes down to her knees. Daryl wonders why she's wearing the pants—is she sleeping with them, or did she put them on just to come down here? Is it for safety or modesty? Does she know what the sight of her bare legs would do to him, what even the thought of them, the sight of her swimming in those clothes, already does? Is that coyness in her smile, or just the angle of her face? She raises an arm to beckon him closer; but how close does she want him?

He hovers above her, hands shaking a little. “Couldn't sleep?” he asks.

“No,” she says. “You?”

“Yeah.”

“Thinkin' too much?”

He gives her a crooked smile. “Thought you knew me better'n that?”

Beth smiles, baring her little white teeth. “Silly me, thinkin' Daryl Dixon has _thoughts_.” She raises her hand again, beckoning. “Com'mon, sit awhile. Ain't got nothing better to do, right?”

“Guess not.” Daryl swings his ever present crossbow down from his shoulder, setting it carefully next to the blanket and sitting beside Beth's stretched out body. She laces her hands on her stomach and looks up, features soft in the moonlight. Daryl follows her gaze into the night, into the carpet of stars spread above their heads.

It's many long minutes before she speaks.

“D'you want kids, Daryl?” she asks.

His head whips down so quickly his neck cracks. “What, now?”

“Not necessarily.” Her hands are still twined over her stomach ( _soft stomach, pale stomach—he'd seen a flash of it when they were washing once, before they found the home—he'd heard a sound from the opposite bank and turned and there she was, breasts peaked and clinging to the white cotton of her bra and stomach downy and smooth and begging for the slip of his hand—but he couldn't do that, wasn't owed it, didn't have the words to even begin—but here she is stretched out beneath him with a shirt baggy around her middle and it isn't hard to imagine—_ )

Daryl swallows the lump in his throat, shifts his seat. “Why you ask?”

Beth shrugs; he's startled to see a tear track down her temple. “I dunno. That whole time we were running, I couldn't let myself—there wasn't room to fall apart.” She sniffs loudly. “But now that we're here, and safe—“

“We ain't. Not really,” he says quietly, almost hoping she doesn't hear.

“I know. I told you, Daryl, I ain't blind. I know how easy it is for things to go wrong.”

“I know you do.” Hesitatingly, Daryl brings a hand up to touch her wrist, fleeting and awkward and quickly pulled away; but she smiles at him for it, and that makes it alright.

“I just can't stop thinkin' 'bout the last time I felt like this. Almost like this,” she says, looking at him shyly. He touches her wrist again, and she breathes in, deep. Seems to decide something. “It was my job to get those kids out.”

“No one asked you to.”

“Still my job, though, wasn't it.” She tilts her head and looks at him. “I ain't carrying it, you don't have to look at me like that.” Daryl looks down at his hands. “I know there's nothing I could'a done. Saving myself was a job too. I did that one.”

“Good thing,” Daryl murmurs, looking at her wrists, face burning again over what he said in the shack, how he hurt her. It's a shame he can't get past, through all the healing they're doing here, and he doesn't much want to. All the shit he's committed in his life, and the worst he ever done he did that afternoon, spewing hate all over Beth Greene. “Never thought I'd be much good for a kid.”

“Hey, don't be like that,” Beth says. “I've seen you with Judith.” She smiles. “You'd even wash your hands before you'd touch her.”

“I don't mean like that, I mean... my own.” Daryl picks at his ragged thumbnail, avoiding her gaze. “Ain't much good for people depending on me.”

“You done alright by me.”

“That's different.”

“How?”

 _You did all that on your own,_ he wants to say. _You got it all backwards._

_I'm the one needs you._

“Just is.” Daryl squints out into the dark night, across the graves.

“My momma had a friend,” he finally says. “Knew'er as Miss Jan; lived 'cross town from us. We went over there sometimes, when Momma was sober enough to know we needed to.”

“You and Merle?”

“Sometimes. Time went on, it'd just be me and her. Then just me.” Daryl looks down at the blanket bunched up between them. “She didn't leave the house much towards the end. I tried to get her to go out, see Miss Jan, round the block at least, but she wouldn't listen. Swelled all up like a balloon, like her whole life'd been stuffed inside her.”

“That sounds hard,” Beth murmurs.

Daryl shrugs. “Is what it is.” He folds his hands across his knees, looks out into the night. “Miss Jan had a baby girl, name'a Precious. Born off'a one of her tricks, some asshole trucker skipped town the minute he heard she was pregnant. But she built herself up, got a boyfriend didn't beat her up every Sunday. Was nice there.”

“Sounds like it.”

“I didn't go over too often, ya know; Merle'd've kicked my ass if he knew. He never liked Miss Jan, thought she babied him.”

“But you liked her?”

Daryl did like her. He liked her a lot. He liked her split level house with its well-kept lawn, her cocker-spaniel dancing around the sprinkler. He liked her hands—small hands, soft hands that held him when his mother was too lit to lift her head, sewed him up till he could do it himself, got to the places he couldn't reach. He liked the frilly aprons she wore sometimes, and the glittery trailer park varnish on her toenails that never quite washed away. He liked her long golden hair that smelled like cookies and baby powder, the songs she hummed as she cooked, the economical way she moved around her kitchen like it was an extension of herself. He liked the way she looked at him, like he wasn't too rough for this side of the tracks, like he could belong.

As he grew, he began to like other things. He liked the way her ass moved beneath her yoga pants, the shadows of something he spied through the worn fabric. He liked her small breasts and the Calvin Klein bras she left on doorknobs and countertops. He liked it when she'd comment on how much he'd grown, how strong he looked; she squeezed his bicep once and he spent that night heaving tires in the junkyard till he collapsed from exhaustion. He liked imagining her fucking in her big warm bed with her sweet warm boyfriend, cunt artfully trimmed and skin moisturizer-soft; he liked picturing himself locked in that room for days, just holding her, listening to the settling of the house.

But most of all, he liked her daughter; liked this squiggly little thing he could hold in his arms and read to and play with and pretend was his own. He liked feeling her little baby gums clamped around his scabbed fingers. He liked the way she looked at him and saw no scars, no despair, no hate. This little girl thought he was the sun and the moon because he fed her milk and held her close.

Of course, Miss Jan didn't last—she and his momma stopped talking and her boyfriend got a new job and they high-tailed it out of that hick town with hardly a goodbye. The day he arrived at her house and found it for sale was the first time he got blackout drunk; he woke up three cities over next to a hooker from Grovetown, and therein went his virginity.

It's been a long time since he thought of Miss Jan, her baby girl; doesn't much want to think of them again, in this big harsh world.

“They ain't here no more,” Daryl says.

“I miss the kids,” Beth says quietly. Everything about this moment is quiet, like the world is holding its breath for them. “I miss Judy. I miss holdin' her, the way she smelled. How she smiled when she looked at me.” She laughs wetly. “I even miss people thinkin' I was her mom. It feels like a disservice to Lori, sayin' that, but... I liked to think she was mine. That I'd created somethin', even if it wasn't me, you know?”

“You're a good momma to that girl,” Daryl says. He can't stop touching her arm, running his fingers over the heavy fabric and the pinch of her bony limb beneath. “You will be when we find her too.”

Beth takes his hand, stills its restlessness. “Look at you,” she murmurs, “Bein' all hopeful.”

Daryl shrugs noncommittally, cheeks stinging. “Say somethin' enough, maybe I'll get to believin' it.”

“I'm glad.” Beth breathes in deep, holding his hand. “I'm just thinkin'... it's so much to put on a little girl, all this hope. On any child. But that's where it all goes. No matter how crappy everything else is... I just think of that little girl out there in the world, and I feel ok.”

“You really think there's hope for her?”

“There's people like you, like Rick. Maggie, and Glenn, Carol, Carl, Ty and Sasha and Bob. Even if we ain't with her, she has family, lookin' out. There's hope in that.”

“Guess so.”

She smiles, teasing. “I _know_ so.”

He smiles back. “You do.”

His heart races when she tugs on his sleeve, shooting a glance at the blanket beside her. “You know the constellations?”

“Some of them.”

“Show them to me.”

Heart racing, he lowers himself beside her, bites his lip as she shifts into his side so their arms are pressed together, her head a hair's breadth from his. He knows when she glances at him by the flutter of her eye lashes.

He swallows, and raises an arm to point to the sky.

“See that there, looks like a teapot? That's the bow of Sagittarius, the archer; he's pointin' his bow at the scorpion, cause legend says the scorpion killed his brother. And see all that blackness? That's part of Virgo, the mother; she only got one bright star, but she's one of the biggest there is. And that there's Orion...”

They lie there nearly till dawn, feeling the gleam of the stars above and the creak of the porch slats, the tangle of moonlight in their hair. As the stars fade away with the rising sun, Daryl thinks they must be the brightest they've ever been.

* * *

 

Someone like Dale might say the intensity of the stars is due to reduced smog in the atmosphere, the lack of man letting nature shine through. But Daryl isn't Dale, and Beth Greene isn't Dale, and anyone qualified to make those statements probably didn't survive long anyhow.

What do the stars know anyway, of loss, of resilience, of hope? Looking at Beth's kind face, her twinkling eyes, he can't help but feel their brilliance is nothing but a mere reflection of the girl watching them.

**Author's Note:**

> Fun fact: People born under Virgo the harvest mother and Sagittarius the archer are considered very compatible. According to astrology.com, their strength as a couple comes from “the security they can give one another once they discover their similar lifestyles. They make a wonderful couple once they can teach one another to look at the world through new eyes.” All they need is communication, and together they can make wonders.


End file.
